Blacklight Blue

by Peter May

  Xavier immediately sensed hostility. One of the two young women seemed faintly familiar. And he had certainly seen the young man before. A body like his, sculpted during hours of patient exercise, was one you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Attractive though he was, however, there was something distinctly aggressive in his manner. Xavier took a step back from the henna’d head. ‘Bonjour messieurs dames.’ He regarded them cautiously. ‘Can I help?’

  Kirsty looked around the cramped little salon with undisguised contempt. Why on earth would her father come here to get his hair trimmed? And almost as if she had read her sister’s mind, Sophie said, ‘He comes once a month on Thursdays. Thursday’s training day.’

  Kirsty raised her eyes to the heavens and sighed. It was typical of her father to live out the world’s stereotypical view of the mean Scot. She said, ‘You cut our father’s hair.’

  Xavier looked at her blankly. ‘Who’s your father?’

  ‘Enzo Macleod,’ Sophie said. ‘And he’s in prison on a murder charge because of you.’

  Xavier blanched. ‘Me? I’ve never murdered anyone in my life.’

  ‘It’s running down my neck.’ The bird-like lady squirmed in her seat, and Xavier glanced at the trails of red on white skin that disappeared beneath her plastic shoulder cover. But he was distracted.

  Kirsty said, ‘Hair found on the body of a woman murdered in Cahors three days ago matches my father’s.’

  Sophie pressed the point home. ‘But that’s not possible, since he wasn’t there.’

  Kirsty finished the tirade. ‘And he didn’t kill that woman.’

  Xavier’s pallor quickly turned pink as blood rushed to the surface of his skin. ‘I don’t see what that has to do with me.’

  ‘Xavier, I can feel it running down my back.’

  Bertrand took a threatening step towards the hairdresser who instinctively flinched, oblivious to the distress emanating from the red head at his fingertips. ‘There’s an easy way of doing this, Xavier, and there’s a hard way. Your choice.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Xavier raised his hands in self defence. Red for stop. ‘I admit it. I did give him some of Monsieur Macleod’s hair.’

  ‘Who?’ Sophie looked as if she were about to physically attack him.

  ‘He said it was for a joke.’

  ‘Who!’

  ‘I don’t know who he was. He came in here about a month ago, just after Monsieur Macleod had left, and said he wanted to buy some of his hair.’

  ‘You mean you took money for it?’ Sophie was incredulous, and her vehemence caused Xavier to take a further step back.

  ‘I refused at first. But he was very persuasive. And in the end, I didn’t really see the harm.’

  ‘Well, you see it now.’ Bertrand glared at him. ‘How much did he pay you?’

  ‘Honestly, I’d stick needles in my eyes before I’d do anything to hurt Monsieur Macleod.’

  Bertrand said, ‘That might still be an option. How much?’

  ‘A hundred euros.’

  They stared at him, their disbelief reflected in Kirsty’s astonishment. ‘A hundred euros! For some strands of hair?’

  ‘Xavier … !’ the woman in the chair wailed.

  Xavier ignored her. ‘He didn’t want clippings. He wanted the hair that had come away in the comb. I hadn’t even had a chance to clean it out. Monsieur Macleod’s chair was still warm.’

  ‘So this guy paid you a hundred euros for a few lengths of my father’s hair, and you didn’t think that was odd?’ Kirsty’s belligerence seemed almost as threatening now to Xavier as Bertrand’s.

  ‘Like I told you, he said it was for a joke.’

  ‘Some joke!’

  Xavier looked at Sophie and noticed for the first time, quite incongruously, the faint strip of white running back through her dark hair. ‘You’ve got the same badger stripe as your father,’ he said, as if he thought they might be distracted by this and forget about his transgressions.

  ‘Magpie,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Magpie they call him, not Badger.’

  Bertrand said, ‘I think you need to shut up your salon, Xavier, and come up to the caserne with us. The police are going to have to take a statement.’

  ‘I don’t want to get into any trouble.’

  ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you went selling your customers’ hair.’

  Xavier sighed theatrically, then took in the stripes of red on the neck of the client wriggling below him in her chair. ‘Oh. My. God! What a mess!’ He immediately began dabbing it with a wet sponge, but it had already begun to dry. ‘It’ll take me a few minutes to sort this out.’

  ‘We’ll wait,’ Bertrand told him.

  And Kirsty said, ‘What did he look like? This guy that bought Enzo’s hair?’

  Xavier waved a distracted hand in the air. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I hardly remember him.’

  ‘Try.’

  Another theatrical sigh. ‘I suppose he must have been about fortyish. Quite good looking, really. His hair was short. I do remember that. Sort of fair. And, oh …’ His eyes lit up. ‘Ears. Hairdressers always look at ears. You have to in this business. Too easy to cut one off.’

  ‘What about his ears?’ Kirsty was staring at him intently.

  ‘Well, it looked like he’d had a nasty accident in a barber’s shop. His right earlobe was completely gone.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Commissaire Taillard viewed the pink-faced hairdresser and the three young people sitting on the opposite side of her desk. The sombre figure of the Scottish lawyer, Simon Gold, stood behind them, leaning his hands on the back of a chair. Whatever his faults, Enzo Macleod certainly inspired loyalty among his family and friends. And she felt a tiny pang of regret with the thought that she, too, might have been one of that inner circle, that sérail, had things turned out differently between them.

  ‘It doesn’t prove that he wasn’t there,’ she said.

  Simon straightened himself, and tugged at his beard with long, bony fingers. ‘And the fact that you found his hair at the scene doesn’t prove that he was. He was having a relationship with the woman, for God’s sake. People shed hair. You might expect to find some of his hair on her clothes.’

  Kirsty cut in. ‘The point is, why would someone pay a hundred euros for some of my father’s hair if it wasn’t to incriminate him?’

  Sophie added, ‘And why would somebody set him up with a phony doctor’s appointment if it wasn’t to blow his alibi out of the water?’

  Commissaire Taillard shook her head. ‘This is all just speculation.’

  Simon said, ‘In the same way, commissaire, that the only evidence you have is circumstantial.’

  But the police chief was conceding nothing. ‘We have a computer diary entry that places him at the scene at the time of the murder. We have hair that ties him to the body of the victim. And his alibi is laughable. People have been convicted on less.’

  Simon said, ‘Just stop and think for a moment, commissaire. If you were going to commit a murder, wouldn’t you come up with a better alibi? You know that Enzo is not a stupid man. Why would he invent such a ridiculous story in the full knowledge that it wouldn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny?’

  There was a knock at the door, and it was opened by a uniformed officer. But Commissaire Taillard’s thoughts were focused elsewhere. ‘No one is suggesting that the murder was premeditated. It might well have been a crime of passion, a moment of anger. And Enzo Macleod left town almost straight afterwards. He probably never imagined that we might tie him to the scene. He never had time to concoct a credible alibi. And the fact is that the building in the Rue des Trois Baudus had been empty for two years.’

  ‘No it hadn’t.’

  Everyone turned towards the door. Nicole stood clutching a beige folder and looking very pleased with herself. She was breathless and slightly flushed.

  ‘I’ve been round every agence immobilière in Cahors trying to find ou
t who had 24 bis Rue des Trois Baudus on their books. Turned out to be an estate agent at the foot of the Boulevard Léon Gambetta.’ She waved her beige folder in the air. ‘And guess what? They rented the building to a Paris-based company three weeks ago. A one-year lease.’

  Hélène Taillard gave a tiny gallic shrug of dismissal. ‘I don’t see how that helps Monsieur Macleod.’

  Nicole said, ‘Well, if you check with the registrar of the Commercial Court in Paris, as I just did, I think you’ll find that the company which took the lease doesn’t exist.’

  Everyone took a moment to digest this.

  Then Sophie leaned forward on the desk and looked earnestly at the police chief. ‘Madame Taillard, you know my dad didn’t do this. You guys were …’ She stopped suddenly, halted by an image of the semi-undressed Hélène Taillard on the canapé with her father, a shared memory which brought a flush to the older woman’s cheeks. ‘Well … you were pretty close. You know there’s not a bad bone in his body. He’d be incapable of killing anyone.’

  The commissaire sat back in her seat and sighed deeply. ‘I wouldn’t disagree with you, Sophie. But it’s not my call to make. I am the chief of police. I am bound by rules and procedures. There is a limit to how much I can intervene. The juge d’instruction already thinks I am compromised because I know your father socially.’

  Simon took the folder from Nicole. ‘But surely, commissaire, the testimony of the hairdresser, and the fact that the building in the Rue des Trois Baudus was leased by a company which doesn’t exist, throws further doubt on an already weak case.’ He smiled. A persuasive smile of reassurance, normally reserved for a jury during summing up. ‘Perhaps, in the light of developments, you might consider discussing with the juge d’instruction, the possibility of letting Enzo out on police bail.’

  Enzo stepped out from the glass-fronted Hotel de Police and drew his first breath as a free man in nearly forty-eight hours. Brittle leaves from the plane trees in the car park lay in drifts among the cars, and rattled across the tarmac in the icy breeze that blew down from the old city walls.

  Inside him welled a great, burning sense of anger. Greater even than his sense of injustice, or his relief at being released unexpectedly on bail. Someone had murdered an innocent woman, just to set him up as a suspect. In order to create a false alibi, he had been duped into a consultation with a phony doctor, and suffered through two days of believing he was dying from an incurable disease. That same someone had tried to murder his daughter, and burned down Bertrand’s gym.

  It had all been one-way traffic. All designed to ruin his life, to distract him from an investigation that someone feared would uncover a murderer. A murderer who, until now, had escaped justice. Of that Enzo was certain.

  But he was certain, too, that he had reached a turning point. A moment in this whole sad and sordid tale, when his adversary had done his worst, and in doing so revealed enough of himself to give Enzo a starting point to fight back. He clung to that thought with a grim tenacity.

  ‘You don’t look very happy to be out.’

  Enzo turned to look at Commissaire Taillard. She had walked him up to the front door from the cells. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I ought to thank you for everything you’ve done.’

  She took his arm and led him through the trees towards the Musée de la Résistance on the corner. ‘Don’t thank me yet, Enzo. This isn’t over. There is still a killer out there. And a few of my officers still think it’s you.’

  ‘But you don’t?’

  Her concession was reluctant. ‘I never really did, Enzo. In fact, I might even have put money on you being innocent.’

  His smile was rueful. ‘You bet on me once before and lost.’

  ‘You got lucky on the Jacques Gaillard case. I don’t hold that against you.’

  They stopped and she turned to face him, her breast lightly brushing his arm. There was a moment between them, a tiny frisson suggesting that perhaps the flame hadn’t been entirely extinguished.

  He said, ‘The only way I’m going to clear my name here is by catching the killer myself.’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s our job.’

  He gave her a look, but refrained from comment. ‘There must be something you can tell me, Hélène. About the murder or the crime scene. Something that would give me a starting point.’

  ‘Absolutely not. You’re just out on bail, Enzo. I can’t go divulging information like that to a suspect.’

  ‘If I really did it, you wouldn’t be telling me anything I didn’t already know. At least tell me how she was murdered.’

  Commissaire Taillard held him in a long, hard stare before blowing through pursed lips in exasperation. ‘She was struck on the face. Sufficiently hard probably to render her unconscious. But that’s not what killed her. The pathologist’s preliminary autopsy report says her neck was broken.’

  Enzo stiffened. ‘Deliberately? I mean, she didn’t break it accidentally when she fell?’

  ‘Oh, no. The médecin légiste was quite clear. The neck was broken by a clean, twisting movement that severed the spinal cord between the third and fourth disarticulated vertebrae. A real pro job was how he described it.’

  Enzo whistled softly. ‘Then I know who did it.’

  ‘What?’ the Commissaire looked at him in disbelief.

  ‘At least, I know who else he’s killed. In a Paris apartment, nearly seventeen years ago.’ His eyes shone with the cold, hard steel of revenge. ‘Which also means I know where to start looking for him.’

  Chapter Twenty

  London, England, July 1986

  He had been surprised at how easy it was. The newspaper’s archives were open for anyone to see, transferred now to microfiche, viewable on any one of a number of machines in the reading room.

  Richard had found the offices of the Daily Mail easily enough. It was before the Associated Press had moved its headquarters to Kensington, and its suite of newspapers was still to be found in the old Northcliffe House in Whitefriars Street, not far from Fleet Street.

  He was not quite sure why he had chosen the Daily Mail, except that it seemed a little classier than the other tabloids, but still certain to carry stories of popular interest. He had no idea what he was looking for. But he had a starting date. One imprinted in his memory, just as it had been burned in red into the bottom corner of the photograph. July 23rd, 1970. Almost exactly sixteen years ago.

  Outside, the City of London baked under the hot July sun, bankers and journalists finally abandoning coats and jackets for open-necked shirts and summer frocks. But in here it was dark and cool, and Richard’s focus was on the screen in front of him as he wound the spool through the reader. He found July 23rd quickly enough, but if anything newsworthy had happened, it would surely have come after that date. Nothing up until then, at least, had disturbed the happiness of a family on a Spanish beach. He spooled quickly through that day’s news stories before moving on to the 24th. But it wasn’t until the 25th that he found what he was looking for. And it shook him to the core.

  Snatched, was the headline. And the sub-head read, Toddler Taken From Spanish Holiday Hotel. Richard ran hungry eyes over the text of the story:

  The Bright family from Essex were still in shock today after the abduction of their 20-month-old son, Richard, from their Spanish hotel room.

  The only traces left by his abductors were the child’s blood-stained panda, and a smeared trail of blood leading into the hall. The kidnappers appear to have made their escape down an emergency staircase at the back of the building.

  Police in the tiny Spanish coastal resort of Cadaquès, near the home of artist Salvador Dali, have sent blood samples for testing. They hope to be able to determine whether the blood belonged to the kidnapped toddler or one of his abductors.

  Local police chief, Manuel Sanchez, said: “We have no idea yet why the child was taken. There has been no demand for ransom. If it turns out that the blood was that of the little boy, t
hen I think we have to fear the worst.”

  The alarm was raised late on the evening of Thursday the 23rd when Richard’s parents returned to their room from a meal in the hotel dining room. They had left baby Richard, brother William, and older sister Lucy, asleep in the room, confident that the children would be safe while they ate.

  A hotel babysitting service had been employed to check on the children every fifteen minutes, but in fact no one had looked in on the room for more than an hour.

  It was after midnight before the local police informed the area headquarters in Gerona, and it was another eight hours before police forces throughout Spain were put on alert. Pictures of the kidnapped Richard were flashed on nationwide Spanish television yesterday, along with a public appeal for information. Investigating officers are now sifting through dozens of reported sightings, from Cadiz to San Sebastian.

  Distraught parents, Rod and Angela, were yesterday being comforted by friends and family. A family spokesman told reporters, “We are still hopeful of having little Richard returned to us. And we would appeal to whoever might have taken him not to harm him. Leave him somewhere safe and inform the police.”

  The one-time fishing port of Cadaquès is situated on a remote peninsula north of Barcelona, on the Costa Brava. A haven for writers and artists, it is regarded as an upmarket resort, unspoiled and largely underdeveloped.

  There were photographs of the whitewashed Mediterranean houses of the old port with an inset picture of the bizarrely moustachioed surrealist, Salvador Dali. A snapshot of the missing boy grinning at the camera. Richard stared for a long time at the picture, a shock of blond curls above a chubby round face. He had seen enough photographs of himself at this young age to be in no doubt that he was the abducted child.

  He wondered if the strange fragmented images that now flooded his thoughts were real memories or imagined ones provoked by the shock of reading about his own abduction. He thought he could remember a darkened room, a woman bending over his cot, lifting him into safe arms, his fingernail catching her cheek, sticky blood on his fingers. His panda falling to the floor. And, then, out of the darkness, being carried from a car. The sound of the sea somewhere far below, exhaling into the night, filling cool air with its salted perfume.